Music

Saturday, June 17, 2017

Like we all must, Stephen Furst, the actor who brought Kent
Dorfman, a.k.a. the sweet, portly Delta Tau Chi pledge known as Flounder, to
life, has passed away. It’d be hard to argue that Furst’s life wasn’t far too
short—after all, he was only 63 years old. But though other actors and
well-known figures who have passed recently may have made a more lasting or
profound mark on the lives of the audience they left behind, Furst’s death
hurts a little bit more for me than those other losses, for a couple of reasons.

In 1977, when I was a freshman at the University of Oregon,
I landed a spot as an extra on the set of National Lampoon's Animal House—specifically,
I was cast as a “Delta pledge,” and I also ended up serving one memorable
afternoon/evening as a stunt double. Both of these roles put me in frequent
proximity to Stephen Furst, who was a rookie on the set of Animal House sort of
like I was—Kent Dorfman was his first big role in a Hollywood movie, after
three minor and forgettable previous appearances.

The Saturday before shooting
began, another extra and I accompanied Furst and Tom Hulce to get our “senior
pictures” taken (the shot of Furst, memorably booed on-screen, is seen above), and like this
wacky morning jaunt to a photo studio in nearby Springfield, for every encounter I
ever had with him during shooting Furst demonstrated himself to be a very
genial, pleasant fella, not unlike Dorfman himself, who was never one to put on
actorly airs as a way of separating himself from the locals.

During the shooting of the Dexter Lake Club sequence, my BFF
Bruce and I spent an amusing afternoon between takes hanging out with him,
Hulce and actress Eliza Garrett (sympathetic receptionist at Emily Dickinson College,
where Faun Lebowitz did all her pottery work—I had such a crush on her!),
talking about movies and other things that made us feel like we (Bruce and I) really
were an important part of what was going on. And I ended my association with the production
of Animal House as Furst’s stunt double—it was me, not Furst, in the Lincoln
Town Car on the last day of shooting as it crashes its way out of the Dexter
Lake Club parking lot. (The costumer felt it necessary to put a down jacket
underneath my suit jacket to approximate Furst’s girth, on the unlikely occasion
that I could be seen on film.) After Animal House was over I never heard from
Stephen Furst again, though seeing him continue on in relative success with his
career afterward, in movies like The Dream Team and TV shows like St. Elsewhere, always made me feel a little bit happy, seeing that one of the good
guys who didn’t look like everybody else on the Hollywood circuit had somehow made
it into the club.

But Furst’s death has also hit me
hard because the actor, who had made his struggle with diabetes front and
center in his public life—he became a fervent spokesperson for the American Diabetes
Association—ended up succumbing from complications directly related to the
disease. Though I am privy to 0% of the details of what life what like for
Stephen Furst in his final years, it’s fairly apparent that I’ve had a more
successful time coping with diabetes than he had, and his passing reminds me
that there are many others who are a whole lot less lucky than I am too. I
could never truly relate to the stories of his struggles to get work as an actor
that he regaled Bruce and I with on that afternoon in Dexter Lake, though I was
always glad to recall how comfortable he felt telling them; but I can
definitely relate to the struggles endured during what must have felt to him like
a constant uphill battle with his body to ward off and control the effects of
the disease that eventually killed him.

As a cautionary tale for folks like
myself, and others who may be hovering in pre-diabetic status, Furst’s story is
an important one to hear. But I’m also glad that I’m one of the lucky ones who
can say they spent time with this personable, talented actor when he was just
getting his feet wet. After I finish typing this, I’m gonna step outside on my
back porch and let loose a hearty “Hey, Niedermeyer!” in his honor, and
remember just how big a hand Stephen Furst had in making National Lampoon's Animal House the rich and delightful comedy classic that, nearly 40 years later,
almost no one would dispute it as being. In my mind, that’s a legacy that’s
every bit as impressive as Kent Dorfman’s, and it’s one that will carry Stephen
Furst’s memory for a long time to come. Rest in peace, Brother Flounder.

Saturday, June 10, 2017

It's kind of hard for me to undersell the impact Batman and Adam West had on me as a boy. I was six years old when the show
premiered, and it was the first program I can remember seeing previews for and
*begging* my mom to commit to letting me watch it when it finally came on. Like
most every boy my age in the mid '60s, I had a makeshift costume, a lunchbox, a
plastic Batmobile, the Batman TV
soundtrack (I still own the original LP), and of course the comic books, which
never seemed quite as captivating to me compared to the vivid pop-art energy of
the series. And hardly least of all, Batman
introduced Julie Newmar's Catwoman to me, who in turn introduced a whole
other set of feelings to this six-year-old-- fear and sex all rolled up into
one inexplicable but ooh-la-la! package. (I'll spare you, and my mom, the
details.)

But all of it revolved
around West and his unique ability-- was it that sonorous, slightly quizzical
delivery?-- to somehow play Bruce Wayne and Batman straight-up, yet ensure that
a clever camp sensibility remained the foundation of his performance. He never
wink-wink-nudge-nudged the audience, and certainly I probably wouldn't have
been aware of it at six years old even if he had. Throughout his run as Batman
there was a three-ring circus of exploding craziness surrounding Gotham City,
and he was the steadfast-and-true ringleader, the one against whose unflappable
reserve and intelligence all the rest of the silliness demanded to be measured.
I loved him. I loved the show. It was the center of the universe for me when I
was too young to know any better. And what a delight it was to discover, years
later as an adult, that Batman wasn't
the simple crap-fest that so many of the shows I liked as a kid often turned
out to be, but instead a wholly aware, sharply funny collage of color, sound
and pop absurdity, all built around the sturdy totem provided by Adam West.

As did everyone to whom that series meant so much, I woke up this morning to the news that Adam Westpassed away at the age of 88 after a brief battle with leukemia. Holy Undertaker, it is the end of the line of Batman this time! But what bat-tastic memories he made. Thanks, Mr. West. This morning my bat cowl is off to you.

Without much due pomp or
circumstance, Walter Hill’s newest movie, The Assignment arrived on home video
this past week. In an age where superheroes and endlessly recycled ideas are
the coin of the realm, when a director like Hill is perceived by studio suits
(if they’re even old enough to remember who he is or what he did) as past his
prime, this delirious noir, a tale of two revenges meted out with methodical
fury and shot through with the director’s usual gritty visual poetry, emerges
as being squarely in the grand tradition of what critic Charles Taylor has dubbed American shadow cinema. (The major difference between the mid ‘70s and now, of
course, is that these days apparently you must seek out those shadows courtesy
of your own home theater, because there’s no room for shadows when every
multiplex screen has been purloined by interstellar shape-shifting robot
vehicles, decrepit pirates and wonder women.)

In The Assignment, Michelle
Rodriguez plays Frank Kitchen, a brutally efficient killer and very hairy macho
man who carries out a hit on the brother of Dr. Rachel Jane, a brilliant
plastic surgeon (Sigourney Weaver). Jane has been drummed out of her profession
and forced to go underground, where she performs radical experiments on
unwilling patients/victims supplied to her by a local mobster. Seething with
the need to avenge her brother and assert her superior vocational mastery, Jane
arranges to have Kitchen kidnapped and delivered to her operating theater,
where she exacts a very particular brand of baroque vengeance, surgically
transforming the macho killer into a woman. Right away The Assignment insists upon its position not as a serious
undertaking of gender reassignment experience, but instead as a somewhat rococo
pulp riff on the question of whether gender determines identity. Those
predisposed toward offense should probably seek out some other violent thriller
featuring a brutal, amoral protagonist who switches sexes and carries out a
meticulous campaign of revenge.

Rodriguez, a punchy, independent presence from her Girlfight get-go, routinely traffics in
roles which emphasize feminine allure gilded with a more traditionally
masculine toughness, and she delivers a confident, convincing performance,
effortlessly reminding us that the murderous instincts within won't be quelled
by the inconvenience of unexpected gender reassignment. (In her male
incarnation, decked out with a beard, chest hair, a somewhat bulbous nose and a
ponytail, she resembles a slightly feminized Oscar Isaac.) Hill has a grand
time in this section of the movie: in an early scene when the pre-surgery
Kitchen emerges from a shower, Rodriguez and her director conspire to goose
their audience's expectations of the sort of demure sleight-of-hand camera
placement which would normally be orchestrated to keep Rodriguez’s sex under
wraps, and the big reveal is comic showmanship of a high order. One can imagine
Neil Jordan and Jaye Davidson standing up and applauding.

The manner in which the strings of the plot are drawn in
tight, as Kitchen and Jane find their way to each other once again, through
darkened hallways, rain-slickened streets and a tangle of clever,
comics-inspired chronological juggling, is orchestrated with sardonic glee by
Hill, who seems energized by the movie’s outlandish premise, and maybe also by
the opportunity to once again get his hands around the process of making a
feature—watching The Assignment, one
of the things you sense most of all is how much fun Hill seems to have had
making it. The movie, acutely aware of its outrageousness, revels in Hill’s
mastery of neo-noir atmosphere, but it’s also brilliantly sustained in its
unwillingness to take matters too far over the top into mindless grotesquerie.

This principle is best embodied by Weaver’s perfectly modulated performance.
The actress, never one to surrender too quickly to histrionics, manages to find
a delicious way of hitting the rafters by underplaying
Jane’s sinister, insistently academic vibe, especially in the scenes where
she’s interviewed by the condescending doctor on staff (Tony Shaloub) at the
asylum where she’s been committed. Like Hannibal Lecter sans appetite, she
loves the game of condescending to her interrogator’s inferior intellect and
second-rate analytical acumen by quoting Shakespeare and pointedly evoking Poe.
(She quotes Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition” as a means of justifying her
sense of being above contemporary morality; he knows only the Vincent Price
movies.) And Hill evokes the American master as well— early on, Jane leaves a
picture of Kitchen from his previous life as a man for him/her to discover
after she wakes up from the reassignment surgery, along with a note attached that
reads, “Nevermore! Nevermore!”

But perhaps the niftiest
thing about The Assignment,
especially for those who have followed Hill’s career from his early days as a
screenwriter (Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway)
through his own run of distinguished action cinema, as a writer-director of
works like Hard Times, The Driver, The
Warriors, The Long Riders, Southern Comfort and Trespass, is the vigor and style that still courses through his
movies. This new one is surely not an example of top-tier Hill, but it’s great
fun and it represents the sort of clean, determined action-movie aesthetic
always championed by the director that seems to have been abandoned in the age
of corporate cookie-cutter blockbusters. (Just put a late-period entry like
this one up against something like Brian De Palma’s Passion and see if you can’t gauge the difference between the two
directors’ comparative level of engagement.) In an interview with Hill in Film Comment earlier this year,
critic Michael Sragow nailed The Assignment’s appeal when he
described it as being “in the great tradition of uninhibited storytelling, from
Edgar Allan Poe to EC Comics." The movie fulfills that juicy description
and then some, and it suggests that, the unwillingness of financial backers
notwithstanding, the greatest, headiest days of Walter Hill’s career are hardly
locked down in past achievements. At 75 years, Hill’s still got it.

Friday, June 02, 2017

A couple weeks ago I was musing on the 2017 summer movie
road ahead and found myself coming up somewhat disappointed in the anticipation
department by a season that seemed to have cornered a new and cynically
celebrated market based almost entirely on the concept of recycling. Then, with
only a smidgen of prompting, I recalled how only two summers ago the portion of
the calendar typically more heavily weighted to the crash-bang-explode variety
of cinema had a real cherry on its hands in the form of yet another “reboot” of
a familiar property. But this one would turn out to be something a bit richer
than just another chapter in the Alien
or Transformers “universes.”

It was just over two years ago that director George Miller,
after months of what seemed to be insurmountable Internet hype and breathless
advance word, unleashed a new chapter in the Mad Max saga he introduced in 1980--
Mad Max: Fury Road. And, surprise, it was the rare sequel which lived
up to that hype, outstripping even the petrol-bomb energy of Mad Max and the influential
post-apocalyptic muscle of The Road
Warrior (1981) on its way to mega-hit status, multiple Oscar nominations
(whaaaat?) and six wins, a heady sweep
of the technical awards which was tarnished only by Miller himself failing to
take home the Best Director award and the movie’s loss of the big prize to Birdman.

Of those two, which movie would you drop everything to see
right now? Well, if you have a jones to avoid the teeming masses headed out to
see Wonder Woman this weekend and
seek a worthy alternative, you could fire up the Blu-ray player and revisit
Miller’s super-fueled demolition fantasia (which, after last year, may seem
less outlandish and more foreboding, politically speaking, that it did before)
in the environs of your own home theater.

Or, if you live in
Los Angeles, you can experience Mad Max:
Fury Road on a double feature with The
Road Warrior, arguably the series’ two peak achievements, big and loud and
projected in 35mm at the New Beverly Cinema, which is, outside of seeing it
IMAX or the drive-in (like I did the first week Fury Road opened), the full-throttle best way to experience Miller Time.
The double bill plays June 2 and 3, and I thought the best
way I could tip my hat to the occasion was to revisit the piece I wrote for
FOVC two years ago, when the moviegoing public was just starting up their
engines to take on Fury Road, and when
I was still processing the eye- and mind-boggling, as well as sublimely
unlikely achievement Miller had managed to turn wild and loose upon the world.
I hope the piece fires you up to head out to the New Beverly this weekend if
you can, or at the very least revisit the Mad
Max digital domain at home. (Maybe for the first time? Could there be
someone inclined toward action cinema out there who has held out on seeing Fury Road for two years?) Miller’s
movies truly are the rockers, the rollers, the out-of-controllers,
fuel-injected suicide machines drunk on fumes and hurtling down a nihilistic
highway rippling with heat and streaked with rubber and blood.

Enjoy.

*******************************

You can practically feel the whole drive-in history of revenge-oriented
biker pictures come roaring up from behind and crashing through the beginning
of George Miller’s 1980 original Mad Max,
informing the movie’s every lunatic move and guiding it as it charts a
change in trajectory for the course of business-as-usual action filmmaking to
come. Even the American International
Pictures logo that accompanied the movie’s American release, which was
initially shown in a dubbed version populated by American actors, lent a sense
of connection to movies like The Wild
Angels (1966), The Born Losers (1967),
Hells Angels on Wheels (1968), The Cycle Savages (1969) and Chrome and Hot Leather (1971), many of
which had been staples on the American International menu. (AIP’s The
Born Losers gave birth to its own mythology, introducing audiences to actor
Tom Laughlin and a character, Billy Jack, whose next movie appearance would set
him on a different sort of vengeance trail.)

Mad Max feels
out-of-control dangerous right from the beginning, its high-powered cars
thundering across a bleak, but still recognizable landscape on a high-octane
trip to oblivion. (The complete societal collapse which would characterize the
subsequent Mad Max films is here
still only a work in progress.) Miller sets the movie’s high-speed action low
on the highway—the threat of road burn seems constant-- and so thoroughly
redefines the concept of that staple of ‘70s action filmmaking, the car chase,
and the level of stunt work required to realize his anarchic, yet graphically
elegant vision, that there could be no looking back, only constant forward
motion.

For me, there may still be no single moment in Miller’s
action portfolio to match the hair-raising sight in the 1980 film of the Night
Rider’s car making an evasive move to avoid a wrecked truck and skipping
sideways down the road (along a slightly compressed focal plane) before
crashing in a ball of flame into another pile of cars. Miller’s signature
image, that of a pair of bloodshot eyes opening wide in horror and intercut
with the moment of impact, gets its grand, unforgettable introduction in this
sequence.

Mad Max is, of course, Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson), a
traffic cop charged with maintaining the last vestiges of law and order in this
increasingly shattered world, who will lose everything—wife, child, sanity— to
an even madder band of punk bikers, led by the Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne),
before the first picture is over. Mad Max’s
final image, that of a deadened Max speeding down a seemingly endless
night-shrouded road, leads straight into The
Road Warrior’s dried-up, post-gas wars organizational breakdown, where
paradigms of societal cooperation have disappeared in a desperate scramble for
enough juice to keep the throttle wide open.

Miller’s 1982 sequel, known in Australia simply as Mad Max 2, sets the pattern of Max as a
wanderer and reluctant savior pressed into the service of a cause that is not
his own—he only wants to scavenge for “guzzoline” and keep moving fast enough to
keep his demons from catching up—that would become the series template to date.
The landscape in The Road Warrior is
even more barren, the mad punks now even more numerous, more scurrilous, motoring
about in a fleet of vehicles seemingly cobbled together and modified from the
world’s junkyard of mismatched spare parts. They’re led by the likes of the
shrieking, Mohawk-capped Wez (Vernon Wells) and the unforgettable Humungus
(Kjell Nilsson), with his strangely Nordic vocal stylings and the throbbing,
mutated skull at all times covered by a goalie’s mask. (Jason Voorhees would
popularize the look later that same summer in Friday the 13th Part III, but Miller and the Humungus
got there first.)

The nomadic band of survivors with whom Max hooks up may be
considerably less individually fascinating than their villainous counterparts
(some things never change, even after civilization crumbles). Even so, the
company of good guys include Bruce Spence’s vividly comic Gyro Captain
(“Remember lingerie?”); a mechanic (Steve J. Spears) with useless legs who is
hoisted about, like Peter O’Toole’s Eli Cross, on a crane; a warrior (Virginia
Hey) who resembles Jennifer O’Neill in extreme survival mode; and the
unforgettable Feral Kid (Emil Minty), who seems at times only one or two steps
past Land of the Lost’s Chaka on the
evolutionary timetable.

Miller doesn’t tip his hand until the end, after he’s finished
his sequel’s mission of upping the ante on Mad
Max’s insane vehicular propulsion with a climactic truck-car chase that
would be the gold standard for years to come, but the saddened, articulate
narration with which The Road Warrior begins
(“My life fades. The vision dims. All that remains are memories…”) and ends
(“As for me, I grew to manhood…”), turns out not to be the words of an older
Max. That narration turns out to belong to the Kid, spoken from a time long
after the movie’s story, and the personage of Max himself, has faded into the
past and become myth. It’s just the right touch to send Max off into another
endless night, its dark skies choked with burning rubber and exhaust fumes, a weary,
burnt-out hero relieved to be alone yet again.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t stay alone for long. The opening
of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) finds
Max wandering yet again, some years after the events depicted in the previous
films. But quite unlike Mad Max and The Road Warrior, this time our hero
doesn’t burst into the frame through the air-gulping carburetor chambers of a
nitro-fitted V8 Interceptor. Rather tellingly, he’s first seen rolling across
the endless, blighted landscape sitting in a crippled vehicle being pulled by a
team of camels. Then he’s set upon by an airborne Bruce Spence (not playing the
Gyro Captain this time—he’s barely playing any
character this time) who separates Max from his carriage, thus forcing him to
trudge into a strange boondock city called Bartertown on foot. It isn’t long
before Max is co-opted into the town’s strange slave society, where brutal
one-on-one fights are staged for the amusement of the citizenry, of course, but
even more so for that of Bartertown’s evil overseer, the Amazonian wonder known
as Auntie Entity. (Auntie Entity is played by Tina Turner, who should have
dropped the mic after charring the screen as the Acid Queen in Ken Russell’s Tommy—there’s just no topping that
cameo.)

There are several darkly humorous, designed-to-be-quoted
lines in the Bartertown section of MMBT (“Ladies
and gentlemen, it’s… dyin’… time!”), but everything leading up to the fight
sequence feels arbitrary, overstuffed and indifferent, and so does the fight
itself, as it turns out. The danger beneath the Thunderdome feels too safe, too
prescribed, and nearly inert— now there’s
a word fans of the previous two chapters would hope never could be used in describing
a Mad Max movie. And it doesn’t help that the outrageous, occasionally lyrical
bombast of Brian May’s scores, which lent the first two films a patina of
Wagnerian tragedy, has here been replaced by the nondescript orchestral
ornamentation provided by Maurice Jarre. (Turner’s pop hit “We Don’t Need
Another Hero,” heard over the end credits, is the movie’s more memorable
musical contribution—it may be the best thing about the movie, period.)

The metaphorical wheel-spinning continues when Max, having
emerged victorious from the Thunderdome’s two-men-enter, one-man-emerges
scenario, is banished from Bartertown and left for dead in the desert. This
being a sequel with seemingly at least one eye on the looming shadow of Steven
Spielberg, Max is rescued by a group of lost children, survivors of an air
crash who think he’s the savior prophesized in their favored myth of a downed
pilot, Captain Walker, who will someday return and lead them out of desolation.
At this point, one can actually feel the movie creaking under the weight of too
much applied warrior hero mythology. The second half is overpopulated by these
charmless, uninteresting kids and Max’s halfhearted attempts to get them to
understand that he’s not who they think he is, with Miller himself seeming all
too willing to indulge the logy import of the Max mythology.

The demands of the plot find Max and kids breaking back into
Bartertown to perform a rescue and hotfooting it out of town on some sort of
train truck, pursued by Auntie Entity and her minions in another set of underimagined
vehicles which look for all the dystopian world like mutated golf carts. And
it’s here you may connect the movie’s general malaise and lack of narrative
energy to the fact that it’s been an hour and 20 minutes before anyone in MMBT even fires up an engine. Eighty
minutes without any car action. In a Mad Max movie. Even the vehicle used by
Max and company in their escape is a disappointment—they hightail it aboard a
modified train engine which rides a quite finite set of rails. Incredibly, the
forward motion that all but defines the force of Miller’s vision is largely
absent in this movie, and what there is remains restricted to a simple line—no
side trips, straight ahead and, despite the presence of those pursuit vehicles,
no real chaser.

This climactic rundown here seems as perfunctory and
prescribed as everything else, and by the end it’s not just Max who seems
exhausted—the entire series seems to have limped to a dead end. And a 30-year
change of pace for George Miller, which included the production of three great
movies made for children that couldn’t have been less post-apocalyptic—the
Oscar-winning Happy Feet, the
Oscar-nominated Babe and its
brilliant sequel Babe: Pig in the City-- seemed
to confirm that the saga of Mad Max would, in fact, be left alone to limp to an
unsatisfying conclusion.

But now, after about 15 years of trying to make it happen,
George Miller, the movies’ great, now-70-year-old punk of the pop epic
apocalypse, has finally returned with a new Max Rockatansky and a renewed sense
of urgency. His new movie, Mad Max: Fury Road seems like an
epic summing up of everything that has ever compelled Miller to put images on
film, and the use of similar words in their titles will serve to remind
viewers, if they could possibly forget, which summer action spectacular truly
embodies the furious. Essentially one long, extended chase, Fury Road is so dynamically, startlingly
choreographed that you begin to feel as though Miller himself is possessed by
the glorious promise of unchecked propulsion, directing his picture almost as
penance for, and an exorcism of the inertia that plagued MMBT.

Mel Gibson has been replaced as Max by Tom Hardy (Locke, The Dark Knight Rises), and—no
slight on Gibson, who always carried Max’s cynicism with the sort of gravitas
from which one could hardly look away-- the new casting registers like an
upgrade right out of the box. Hardy’s opening narration seems similar to that
which opened The Road Warrior, but
this time the speaker’s identity is no mystery, cuing us not toward any
mythopoetic perspective on Max but instead offering a clue to the identity of
the voices bashing around in his head. “I am haunted by those I could not
protect,” he intones, “running from the living and the dead,” those dead
embodied by the vision of a pleading pre-teen girl who addresses him as “Dad”
and whose continual appearances undermine what’s left of his sanity. (Fans of the series will likely remember that
the child lost by Max in the first film was a toddler and a boy.)

Max is soon captured and enslaved by one Immortan Joe (Hugh
Keays-Byrne, once the Toecutter), a psychotic dictator irradiated and ravaged
by disease who presides from behind a sardonic metal rictus over the Citadel, a
literal oasis in the desert where greenery is cultivated and an entire people
remains subject to Joe’s control over a deep, apparently endless supply of
water, which he doles out on occasion in order to keep the rabble in line. This
aspect of Fury Road is likely to
resonate with an extra frisson for the drought-stricken citizenry of California
and the rest of the Southwest—“Do not become addicted to water,” Joe offers
with a patriarchal sneer as the thirsty
gather beneath him, awaiting their periodic drenching. “It will take hold of
you, and you will resent its absence.” (In the years since the gas wars that
crippled society just before the time of The
Road Warrior, we’re informed that the population has also set against
itself in an attempt to secure possession of water rights as well. So we have that to look forward to.)

Joe also presides over a brood of female slaves who are
literally milked and kept in perpetual pregnancy, the better to provide hopefully
healthy, non-mutated, male offspring
to perpetuate Immortan Joe’s lunatic rule. But not all females are exploited for procreational purposes. Joe’s
right-hand woman (who just happens to be missing her own left arm) is Imperator
Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a fierce warrior who is sent out on a mission to
collect up a supply of gas and bullets which will keep the Citadel mobile and
defended. But what Joe doesn’t know is that Furiosa has smuggled five of his
most prized females, two of whom are pregnant, along with her— unbeknownst to
anyone, they’re really headed for the “Green Place of Many Mothers,” a
mysterious oasis of plenty where Furiosa was born. She intends to deliver the
women to a new world where they can take up residence far away from the
oppressive patriarchal rule of Joe and so many others like him.

As is so often the case, in movies as in life, the getting
there turns out to be almost all the fun. Joe and his Warboys, mounted on a
delirious assortment of surreally modified vehicles, each one seemingly more
awesome than the last, give chase. (Here a special, awe-inspired salute must be
reserved for the movie's production designer, Colin Gibson.) Max is literally mounted on the front of one pursuit
vehicle, driven by a dying Warboy named Nux (Nicholas Hoult) who seeks a
glorious death while siphoning off Max’s replenishing supply of plasma. (Nux
refers to Max as his “blood bag.”) As critic David Edelstein observed in his
splendid assessment of the movie for New
York magazine, seeing Mad Max: Fury
Road for the first time may involve a slight disorientation, a sensation
that the movie has started mid-story, and it’s something of a marvel to realize
how Miller and co-scenarists Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris, dole out
important character information in seemingly reverse order, setting up
revelations instead of simple backstory. A second viewing certainly relieved me
of the obligation to try and beat the clock of the movie’s relentless pace,
figuring out relationships and situations on the fly, and also made clear that
everything you need to know is just as likely reinforced by what Miller and his
brilliant cameraman John Seale are showing as much as what the characters can
tell. And there is a lot to process.

But part of the joy of experiencing this movie is
recognizing the degree to which its chaos is precisely modulated, our eyes being
offered exactly what we need to see. Yet the movie never plays like a control
freak’s vacuum-packed vision. The action sequences are breathless and
relentless, but somehow Fury Road never
tires you out. Part of that may have something to do with never getting the
sense that Miller, despite this being the fourth picture of the series, is
repeating himself. He shows us some of the most insane action choreography ever
committed to film, edited at a pace that is much more in keeping with up-to-the-minute
action movie velocity, yet he never loses the audience in a clutter of cutting.
The fighting, man on man, vehicle and vehicle, is all staged and assembled with
intense graphic intelligence and awareness—one action leads logically to
another, and we’re left to follow a line of visual thought rather than throw up
our hands in frustration at not being able to sort out shards of edited flash
meant to generate artificial excitement.

And occasionally, mid-chase, Miller pulls back to orient the
pursuer and the pursued in a long shot stretching over miles of desert, doling
out an amused god’s sense of geographical and spatial relationships, a gentle
reminder that no moment of respite can ever last too long.

There are levels of wit to discover within the design of
almost every shot of this picture too, and you may find yourself laughing a lot
in between shallow, adrenaline-fueled breaths. Film buffs will delight in how
nods to filmmakers as disparate as fellow Aussie Peter Weir and Andrei
Tartovsky have been woven into the landscape of motion within Miller’s points
of reference. In one of my favorite seemingly tossed-off moments, during the
quiet aftermath of a raging sandstorm, a long shot of a desert mountain turns
out not to be quite what we thought it was. During one extended sequence, the
front end of Furiosa’s truck catches fire and she uses the cowcatcher attached
to its nose to churn up a giant cloud of red earth to extinguish the flames, a
move which is then followed by a quick shot of the carburetor sucking in a
forceful gulp of air. And when Max is finally given a proper introduction to
the female cargo on the truck, Miller stages them hosing themselves off in what
might, in other circumstances, register as the world’s end of wet T-shirt
contests. Max, however, is more practical— he keeps a shotgun pointed in their
direction and douses himself with a mighty drink of water.

Hardy is terrific here, going toe to toe with our memories
of Gibson’s sexy disaffectedness in a feat of pop culture approbation that will
likely stand alongside Mads Mikkelsen’s hijacking of Hannibal Lecter from the
Oscar-winning likes of Anthony Hopkins. He even benefits from Miller’s delayed
gratification strategy of keeping Max behind a harness mask for the first half
hour of the movie—you’ll want more of Hardy’s magnetism, and Miller assures
that you’ll get it.

Actually, the movie is full of faces you want more of— Hoult
and Keays-Byrne, of course, but also Zoe Kravitz, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley,
Abbey Lee, Courtney Eaton and Riley Keough (Elvis Presley’s granddaughter) as
Immortan Joe’s prized harem on the run, Nathan Jones as Joe’s overdeveloped son
Rictus Erectus, John Helman as Slit, Nux’s rabid Warboy counterpoint, and
Melissa Jaffer as the leader of the Vuvalini, a group of tough, weather-beaten
old women who know the secret behind the Green Place of Many Mothers.

But as much as the movie is called Mad Max: Fury Road, it could just as easily be called Furiosa Road. The beating heart of the movie is located
within Charlize Theron’s angry, almost feral performance, and she holds the
screen here in a way that she never has before. Her body language, her
unwavering glare, the tension and wariness in her voice all contribute to
Furiosa’s weary resolve—in this outrageously stylized role, she has never been
more natural on screen, and certainly there has never been a character in this
series so strong, so concisely delineated, one so capable of heroism and moral
resolve, to provide a counter to Max’s haunted persona. Furiosa is the
emotional nexus of the movie as well, and when her moment of devastation comes
Miller and Seale honor her, and Theron, with the most memorable and moving of
tableaux in a movie saturated with kinetic visual poetry.

Resistance going in to Mad
Max: Fury Road is understandable—the movie has been showered with so much
advance praise that it’s almost impossible not to feel like expectations have
been unreasonably raised. And like Boyhood
last year, the only reasonable response to the hyperbole is to remember that
only time can reveal the enduring appeal and significance of any piece of art. Spending
too much time debating whether or not Fury
Road achieves instant masterpiece status is to risk missing what it has to
offer in the here and now. But I would go so far as to agree with a friend of
mine who felt, in his qualified admiration for Fury Road, that all other purveyors of modern action cinema should
look at this thing and be embarrassed and ashamed.

In the here and now, Miller and company, as they did in 1980
with the original Mad Max,have once again raised the bar not only
for the outrageousness of practical stunts, but also for how those stunts can
be composed and arranged for maximum clarity and effectiveness and emotional
resonance. In an age where computer-enhanced imagery (and there is some on display here) is the coin of
the realm and editing has been reduced to slamming a succession of images
together with little regard for what they all add up to, the relentless
physicality of Mad Max: Fury Road is
a particularly welcome tonic. While watching this amazing movie a second time
last night and considering the prospects of every other action movie of the
summer scheduled to follow in this one’s wake, I was reminded of the words of
Bill Paxton’s panicked marine sergeant in Aliens.
That’s it.Game over, man.